Tele* (Telestar) services such as teleeducation, teleconsultation, and telemedicine are becoming increasingly popular and prevalent. These services typically are provided from a teleservice provider connected to a customer via a data facility. The most common type of data facility for such a connection is an integrated services digital network (ISDN) connection which includes both a signaling channel and one or two 64 kilobit bearer channels. In addition, there are various arrangements for using the ISDN/SS7 signaling arrangements with a broadband data bearer channel.
However, the demands of Telestar services are significantly more elaborate. One such user of telemedicine is a large hospital complex having many departments, each of which can have a plurality of doctors' offices and/or laboratories. A call to the hospital may involve connections, for example, to the oncology department, the x-ray department and the hospital archive. Additionally, service delivery includes organizations not associated with the hospital such as a pharmacy (e.g., Walgreens), insurance providers, etc. that must be consulted during patient treatment. A problem of the prior art is that there is no satisfactory arrangement for efficiently automating the collaboration and consultation for information exchange during multi-party service delivery transactions.